At Work with The Ready

Ready for a wake-up call? Today’s episode of Brave New Work is all about conscious leadership—a way of showing up that asks us to be responsive rather than reactive, present rather than lodged in the past or the future, feeling-full rather than feeling-empty, and radically responsible rather than carelessly unaccountable. Sound hard? Exhausting? Wildly uncomfortable? It is.

That’s why Aaron Dignan and Rodney Evans called in Jim Dethmer, founding partner of the Conscious Leadership Group and co-author of The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership. They talk to Jim about why doing this self-work is so important, why transformational leadership depends on it, and how entire teams and organizations can become more self-aware.

Our book is available now at bravenewwork.com

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This is the third episode in a crossover mini-series between Brave New Work cohosts Rodney Evans and Aaron Dignan and Chase Chapman, builder of DAOs and host of the On the Other Side podcast. Each episode dives into a specific topic related to organizational design for Web3. Today, they talk about the governance structures currently used in most DAOs and why transitioning away from a voting-based model and toward a consent-based model is a move worth making.

This is the second episode in a crossover mini-series between Brave New Work cohosts Rodney Evans and Aaron Dignan and Chase Chapman, builder of DAOs and host of the On the Other Side podcast. Each episode dives into a specific topic related to organizational design for Web3.

Today, they talk about some of the blurriness between DAO customers and contributors, and how to design and define roles inside these nascent communities so emergence can you-know-what.

This is the first episode in a crossover mini-series between Brave New Work cohosts Rodney Evans and Aaron Dignan and Chase Chapman, builder of DAOs and host of the On the Other Side podcast. Each episode dives into a specific topic related to organizational design for Web3.

Today, they talk about different proposal types, the best ways to structure them, and the critical info that should go into each.

Dear awesome listeners: You’ve been asking us great questions, so it’s high time we take a stab at answering them. That’s why we’re going back to the mailbag to address some of the big stuff on your mind, from impostor syndrome to AI’s place in the future of work to the risk of doing something versus the risk of doing nothing.

In this episode of Brave New Work, Aaron Dignan and Rodney Evans get into all that and more...plus they cook up some excellent t-shirt ideas.

Our book is available now at bravenewwork.com

We want to hear from you. Send your thoughts and feedback to [email protected]

Looking for some help with your own transformation? Visit theready.com

If you won’t say it, we will: Making working agreements is dope. Doing so can give teams an equal opportunity to contribute; provide clarity where clarity is missing and causing friction; introduce new employees to an organization’s source of truth. We could go on. And because it’s not uncommon for us to hear, “But agreements can lead to inadvertent bureaucracy,” we did.

In this episode of Brave New Work, Aaron Dignan and Rodney Evans are clearing the air on what the job of working agreements is, when they make sense, how they help teams pin down fundamentals to unleash creativity and go fast, and what could go in your own team’s agreement-making starter pack.

Our book is available now at bravenewwork.com

We want to hear from you. Send your thoughts and feedback to [email protected]

Looking for some help with your own transformation? Visit theready.com

If you’re like us, you’ve binged all of Netflix’s docuseries about Formula 1 racing. And if you’re like Ready member Jurriaan Kamer, you’re not only steeped in the popular sport, but also often thinking about its overlap with self-management and org design. Turns out that when you peer under Formula 1’s hood, you find provocative organizational lessons about requiring room for reflection, distributing authority, clarifying purpose, innovating alongside intense regulation, and accelerating change at lightning-speed.

In this episode of Brave New Work, Aaron Dignan and Rodney Evans speak with Jurriaan about why modern businesses can use Formula 1 as a blueprint for efficiency and inventiveness and how he translated the sport’s organizational insights in his own business fable, "Formula X: How to Reach Extreme Acceleration in Your Organization."

If you want to learn more about Jurriaan's work his book, check him out here: https://www.jurriaankamer.com/

An F1 car in 2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrari_F1-2000

An F1 car in 2021: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrari_SF21

Our book is available now at bravenewwork.com

We want to hear from you. Send your thoughts and feedback to [email protected]

Looking for some help with your own transformation? Visit theready.com

Doing the accountability dance in the world of self-management, where everyone’s balancing a different portfolio of projects and priorities, can be tricky. When an initiative needs nudging, when a product needs launching, or when a gap in the system needs filling, who owns that work? Who should own it? And how does an organization create space for vision and ownership to emerge?

Rather than force stuff to get done or let tensions surface at a hare-like pace, maybe there’s a third way that asks, “How are we showing up to this work and what clarity do we need about the roles we play?” Tending to that question can nurture an ecology of contribution—where the right participants with the right superpowers identify the right work to help steer the system forward.

In this episode of Brave New Work, Aaron Dignan and Rodney Evans explore how to answer "who's driving the bus?" when there are no bosses to default towards.

Our book is available now at bravenewwork.com

We want to hear from you. Send your thoughts and feedback to [email protected]

Looking for some help with your own transformation? Visit theready.com

You’ve probably heard this advice before: “Find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” But missing from that laughably quaint maxim is the promise of a job ever loving you back. The “labor of love” myth sits at the heart of some of our most core beliefs about work. But the expectation that the place cutting our paychecks should be the same place giving our lives meaning isn’t an old one; it’s a pretty new conceit that’s come into focus as the shape of work itself has changed—demanding more of our time and emotional capacity while providing us with less pay and security.

In this episode of Brave New Work, Aaron Dignan and Rodney Evans speak with independent journalist and labor reporter Sarah Jaffe, who traces this history in her most recent book Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone. She shares how perhaps the pandemic has imploded the “labor of love” myth for good.

Our book is available now at bravenewwork.com

We want to hear from you. Send your thoughts and feedback to [email protected]

Looking for some help with your own transformation? Visit theready.com

Think you’ve been working from home during the pandemic? Writers Anne Helen Petersen and Charlie Warzel have news for you: You haven’t. Rather, you’ve been sending more Slacks and going to more meetings in order to beat back stress and white-knuckle your way through this mess before we get back to the way things were... right?

Legit flexible work requires intentionality, mindfulness, nuance—a.k.a. real structural and emotional labor. Instead, we’ve ported bad behaviors and cultural residue from the cubicle to the couch, thus delaying the arrival of a truly adaptive work-from-home future. But it's not all bad news.

In this episode of Brave New Work, Aaron Dignan and Rodney Evans talk with Anne and Charlie about their new book, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home, which reveals the rot inside our old systems and points out new strategies for transforming not only where we work, but also how we work.

Our book is available now at bravenewwork.com

We want to hear from you. Send your thoughts and feedback to [email protected]

Looking for some help with your own transformation? Visit theready.com